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Why Newspapers are Dying
By Martin English | December 12, 2008
It’s all about the numbers, according to this O’Reilly Network article, Why Are Newspapers Dying?.
As of April, 2008, only three newspapers had a subscriber base in excess of 1,000,000 readers – USA Today (2.3 million), The Wall Street Journal (2.1 million) and the New York Times (1.1 million). Most newspapers average approximately 300,000 subscribers. This of course doesn’t reflect total readership numbers – many papers sell a significant proportion of their subscriber levels in newsstand and library sales – but it does provide at least a basic metric for understanding the dynamics of newspaper publishing vs. the web.
Blogging guru Robert Scoble compiled a list in 2007 of Google Reader subscribers for a number of newspapers, individual bloggers, and online news providers. Keep in mind that these rates reflected the number of RSS feeds that were read through Google Reader, which represents perhaps five percent of the total news-feed consumers. Using that as a (very rough guide), organizations such as Tech Crunch had around 130,000 subscribers from this source alone, which equates to perhaps 2.5 million readers online either from direct site visitors, or increasingly due to RSS links. The New York Times, by comparison, had perhaps 40,000 such Google Reader subscribers (maybe 800,000 total readership). Significantly, Scoble himself had about 5,000 individual Google Reader subscribers.
These readers are not the main source of revenue. The main source of revenue for newspapers is advertising. However, both the startup costs and the running costs for a newspaper are getting higher and higher, while the credit crunch means advertising revenues are lower. For example, the Chicago Tribune is bankrupt, while the New York Times is losing money.
The good news, according to the article, is that while newspapers are dying, good journalism isn’t. As a rough metric, it quotes a report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
University noted that in December 2008, for the first time, more online journalists were imprisoned than print journalists. In 2008, 48% of all journalists that were imprisoned by censoring governments were online journalists, while 45% were print journalists.
The reason this is important is that whether Newspapers survive or not, we as a society need to shine a light on the inner workings of both governments and corporations. The fact that bloggers are now doing this in sufficient numbers and with sufficient accuracy to be seen as “dangerous” enough to jail gives them a high degree of legitimacy.
Topics: History, People, Politics, Technology | No Comments »
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